Cartoons to end all binge-drinking.

(From Off Licence News)

Et tu Brute? As if the government and the cops and the pub trade and the thought police weren' enough, the latest attack on off-licences has come from the Society of Independent Brewers - the very people working to get local beers into shops through their Direct Delivery Scheme. SIBA has commissioned spoof reproductions of 18th-century satirist William Hogarth's famous engraving Gin Lane. "Binge Lane" shows drunken tramps, fighting youths and scantily-clad schoolgirls outside an off-licence cunningly named Beer Gin Booze - while "Pub Street" shows a collection of overweight bourgeois guzzling pints of ale in a much more sedate environment. SIBA chairman Peter Amor said: "The pub is practically the only place where you can drink draught beer, and people's behaviour there is subject to strict controls by the licensee and by the presence of mature, well-behaved regular customers who wouldn' stand for any kind of trouble." That's right folks, just keep telling yourselves that.

Suddenly I see ... me in the dock Scottish songstrel KT Tunstall has admitted a murky past working among us - in an off-licence in St Andrews. And not just that, she "sexually harassed" her boss while she was at it. "I sexually harassed my boss at work and ended up going out with him for a year and a half. We had to taste all this wine and whisky so I was in a perpetual state of booze-fuelled arrogance," said the singer. "I seem to remember pushing him up against the side of a car and insisting he kiss me. He did struggle for a while but he gave in eventually." But she added: "I'm not promoting sexual harassment, girls. It doesn' always work." (Retailers should take note that what might be a charming lunge for a pretty young pop star could land many of the rest of us in an employment tribunal. Ed) Queen takes a purple tipple Is that Her Royal Majesty the Queen ...